I had a buddy when I first landed ice side who used to quote this old piece of Terran media all the time:
“All these worlds are yours, except Europa; attempt no landing there.”
Well, you can guess where my buddy is now. Pure statistics. Most of us are dead.
But I still think about that quote. It feels like a warning from someone who didn’t think we’d ever get a chance to heed it. The guy who wrote that line had never stood on this forsaken berg, looked up into Jove’s great red eye, and tried to remember what it was like to feel his toes. But he knew. Somehow, he knew.
I think about the word “hubris.” I think about people I’ve never met who don’t know my voice, or how I move, or what I look like, and yet they thought they’d go ahead and send me here to freeze. They know my name, rank, age, height, weight, and serial number. And that’s enough for them I guess.
I wish I knew the story that quote was from. And I wish those strangers sitting around their war rooms would read it. I wish they could have heard my buddy say it over and over and over again while his coms hissed and crackled and finally sputtered out for good as he disappeared into the depths beneath the ice.
We used to tell my buddy to shut the fuck up whenever we were laying in our bunks at night and that old quote started up again. But now I hear it all the time, more than it was ever said.
I look up at the impossible, terrible face of Jove above me, and then down at the ice covering the endless darkness beneath me, and I hear my buddy’s voice, faint, but clear, bubbling up to me from way way way way down:
“All these worlds are yours, except Europa.
Attempt no landing there.”
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